On expert power, information laundering, and the suspension of Muslims
Sweden presents itself as a frontrunner in democracy and the rule of law, where decisions by public authorities are to rest on objective grounds and everyone is treated equally before the law. Yet over the past ten years a large number of public decisions have been made about Muslim organisations – withdrawn grants, revoked permits, terminated collaborations – without basis in the organisations’ actual activities.
When a particular group is repeatedly excluded through decisions that cannot be justified on objective grounds, the very principles on which the rule of law rests begin to fail. And the pattern is too consistent to be random.
To understand what is at stake, the Swedish context matters. In the Nordic model, unlike the Anglo-Saxon one, civil society organisations have long held a place within the state itself. Through Sweden’s popular-movement tradition (folkrörelsetraditionen), organisations have received public funding while retaining the right, and the expectation, to criticise the government, to help shape policy together with municipalities and public bodies, and to represent their members autonomously. Public money has not implied state control; it has come with civic space. Muslim organisations entered this space in the 1990s and early 2000s as new popular movements and were, for a time, accepted as such. This is why the withdrawal of funding in Sweden means something quite different from a mere loss of money: it strips an organisation of its legitimacy as a recognised counterpart, of its ability to cooperate with other civil society organisations and with the public sector, and of its standing to speak without being labelled illegitimate. It is this trust-based space that is now contracting, particularly for the organisations that have been cast as the others.
A clear example is how Sida (Sweden’s international development agency) in January 2026 halted its strategic partnership with Islamic Relief Sweden (IRS) on security grounds, even though Sida itself states that IRS is an actor with “unique added value in the humanitarian system,” that its aid is effective, and that, according to the decision’s own supporting documentation, there is no sign of anti-democratic or violence-endorsing activity. The decision rested on an opinion from the Centre for Preventing Violent Extremism (CVE), a Swedish government agency, which referred to “a degree of probability of ideologically coloured influence.”
In several links of the chain that led to the decision, the same name recurs: the terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp, an associate professor at the Swedish Defence University, in roles ranging from knowledge production to opinion-making to board-level decision. Only weeks after the scandal and ministerial interference surrounding that very decision became known, the same man was appointed, just before midsummer 2026, by Simona Mohamsson (Minister for Education and Integration, leader of the Liberal Party) as special investigator for a government inquiry into “religious radicalisation with a focus on political Islam.” It is illustrative of the mechanism this text concerns.
The IRS case is not an exception; there are many more like it, exhibiting the same movement: suspicion is created, normalised, and materialised. False, uncertain, or selective claims are given institutional weight, recur as evidence for themselves, and are ultimately used to deny organisations resources, legitimacy, and room to act. What is decisive is that the system never presents itself as a system. No rule says that Muslim organising is to be shut down; instead, each intervention is framed as a particular case, with its own argumentation and its own administrative form. It is only when the cases are placed side by side that the effect becomes visible: that it is Muslim organising that, again and again, ends up under review, while each individual case is treated as a separate security matter.
I call this mechanism ranstorpism.
Ranstorpism – the suspension of minority organising in the name of democracy
What happened to IRS is not that the organisation was banned, but that it was gradually deprived of its room to act while its formal rights remained in place. This is what is meant by suspension. And this is what can be said to happen: ranstorpism places Muslim organisations in suspension. They retain formal rights such as corporate registration and freedom of expression, but their actual room to act is dismantled through insinuation, recurring reviews, and administrative exclusions, justified in the name of security, crime prevention, and/or democracy.
The pattern appears to be ordered in three phases that reinforce one another in a spiral. In the first phase the claim is created: that certain groups are dangerous rather than vulnerable, extreme rather than oppositional, security threats rather than democratic civil society actors. In the second phase the claim is normalised into institutional truth, through repetition and movement between institutions until it appears to be established knowledge. In the third phase it is materialised in formal and informal decisions that carry grave material consequences.
The process can be understood as a kind of laundering of information. Just as money laundering gives illegal funds a seemingly legitimate source, information laundering gives rumours, journalistic opinion, and sometimes outright anti-Muslim material the appearance of scientific knowledge. This happens as claims undergo a genre shift: a rumour can become a report by an “expert,” the report can become “intelligence information,” the intelligence information can become a legal “fact” that can serve as the basis for repressive decisions. Often, moreover, mere suspicion suffices as grounds for the decisions, as in the case of IRS’s withdrawn funding. This is not a theoretical construction but something concrete and traceable. It is shown, for example, in the chain of security reports that, as I will demonstrate, cite one another but, on examination, bottom out in a single source: a source that in practice cites itself.
The creation
The first link in ranstorpism is to create the suspicion. The raw material often comes from blogs, social media, and think tanks, from actors with varying motives: economic or political interests, personal traumatic experiences, and sometimes openly racist agendas, that converge in the conviction that a certain group constitutes a threat to society. It consists of stereotypes of Muslims as security risks, rumours of organisational ties, and opinions about what “Islam thinks,” often as though Islam were a creature in its own right beyond actual Muslims. Already here a shift occurs: people and organisations are understood not by what they do, but by what they are assumed to represent.
For this raw material to be usable institutionally, it is recoded. Demands for a prayer room or a visible hijab can be recoded from freedom of religion into signs of Islamist infiltration. The recoding also strikes rights work: in an MSB document (MSB is the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency) engagement for “the rights of people with disabilities and of homosexuals” is described not as an expression of democratic values but as a strategic tool for gaining legitimacy, a “convenient” way to appear as a representative actor.
The tool that holds the recoding together is the concept of Islamism. In my and Mattias Irving’s analysis of six central documents from MSB’s project to protect society from “Islamists” (2025), we show that the concept slides between three meanings: violent extremism, everyday Muslim identity, and peaceful Muslim civic activism. That elasticity makes the label expansive. It can be attached with support in everyday religiosity or civic activism, and then slide over to mean violent extremism, whereupon the actor is treated as a danger to society even though no dangerousness has been demonstrated, even after diligent searching. The label activates collective fear, bypasses the requirement of concrete evidence, and renders Muslims suspect in principle without any act needing to be demonstrated.
The next step is to give the suspicion a seemingly empirical basis. How this is done is clearly seen in the report Salafism and Salafist Jihadism 2.0 (Salafism 2.0, Ranstorp & Ahlerup, 2022), which Mattias Irving and I have reviewed. There, trivial events – someone firing an air rifle, telling a parking attendant to get lost, or boys making gender-stereotyped comments in school – are presented as evidence of Salafism and jihadism, without any explanation of why it should be a matter of precisely that. Salafism, Islamism, Muslims, immigrants, extremism, and social unrest are treated as interconnected without being analytically separated. The report is edited by academics and published under an agency name linked to defence and security, but rests avowedly on second-hand accounts from municipal officials – what they have “heard,” sensed, or interpreted – and on opinion material, including the blog and editorials of Per Gudmundson.
The same pattern recurs in Ranstorp’s Rosengård report and the often-cited (by him) Situation Report Norrby. (Norrby is a neighbourhood in the Swedish city of Borås.) What is presented as empirical evidence often lies several steps removed from what is claimed to be proven: the evidence may concern other people, other places, or other times than those who later have to bear the consequences. In the gap between observation and conclusion, room opens for interpretations governed by prejudices that are rarely disclosed and even more rarely tested.
A further example is MSB’s 2017 report on the Muslim Brotherhood, which has gained enormous influence in the same knowledge production even though it was dismissed as substandard by leading scholars of religion and was called “a basis that would never be approved as a term paper at a Swedish university.” In the report’s methods section, the background of co-author Pierre Durrani is presented as “a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood with great ‘inside’ understanding” as a methodological asset, an insider knowledge that in practice is allowed to replace the requirement of source citations. Durrani thereby becomes at once author, factual source, and object of study, even though a single individual’s experiences during a period in the 1990s can hardly substantiate widely varying claims about organisations’ governance, finances, and ideological loyalties across decades.
When the kind of claims attributed to Durrani’s insider knowledge are made in agency reports, they moreover gain new weight. They shift genre, and with that their function begins to change. The same happens with claims from blog posts, editorials, hearsay, and officials’ speculation: they can suddenly begin to appear as research, fact, or intelligence information. And the genre shift is then completed only when the material travels onward, into new institutions and new decisions, which I will demonstrate.
Which sources get to become knowledge?
Specialised fields are often marked by small networks and recurring actors. That in itself is unremarkable. What is decisive is what is allowed to gain institutional traction, and which knowledge milieus get to define what the state perceives as risk. And here the question is seldom settled by the quality of the source, but by whether its conclusions confirm what is being sought.
This is seen in how Ranstorp’s network relates to research. Instead of starting from the established empirical research on Muslim civil societies and Salafist milieus that is actually conducted, in Sweden and internationally, this knowledge production leans instead on a small circle of sources that confirm an already formulated political narrative. It is a reversed order: instead of beginning in facts and from there seeking explanations, the underlying material seems to be selected selectively, academic or not, to support the conclusion one has already arrived at.
The editorial writer Per Gudmundson (formerly at the major newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, now active in alternative right-wing media) illustrates this clearly. In the report Between Salafism and Salafist Jihadism (Salafism 1.0), his blog material is described as important for “piecing together fragments of information into an overall picture,” and his texts are frequently used as factual information throughout the report. In a research overview from the state expert committee Delmi, the same Gudmundson appears as an actor who has contributed to normalising racist and xenophobic ideas, among other things by describing the nation’s impending “downfall,” while he is previously known for, among other things, linking immigration to race-biological notions about IQ.
The same material, the same person, but in one milieu a legitimate basis for security analysis, in the other an example of racism that research examines critically.
Imported suspicion production
In Swedish ranstorpism, suspicion is to a high degree created through the import of ready-made international enemy images.
An important figure for the knowledge that has underpinned the shutting down of Muslim actors in Europe and the United States is Lorenzo Vidino (director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University), who has, among other things, been engaged as an expert by the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency and who was co-author of the one peer-reviewed text we have found that Ranstorp has written in the past 15 years.
At the same time, Vidino has been revealed to be paid by the intelligence firm Alp Services, financed by the United Arab Emirates, to undermine the dictatorship’s opposition. Concretely, he is reported to have delivered, among other things, name lists and “interesting rumours,” packaged in dossiers to blacklist various actors, including Islamic Relief. This is not only about false data and conclusions, but about a way of working in which the suspicion comes first and rumours, connections, and fragments are gathered to be able to carry it.
The research project Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University moreover describes Vidino’s scholarly record as poorly substantiated and marked by studies financed by think tanks with backgrounds in anti-Muslim milieus, including the Investigative Project on Terrorism. They also show how Vidino cites conspiracy theorists and journalists as though they were academic authorities, and that several of his works have had difficulty passing independent peer review. Vidino displays ranstorpism as method and knowledge logic in internationally professionalised form: associations, rumours, name lists, and ideologically inflected sources are packaged as expert knowledge about “hidden Islamist networks.”
When Swedish actors elevate Vidino as an authority, an already established international grid of suspicion is thus brought into the Swedish context. The same is seen in Ranstorp’s use of sources on Twitter, now X. It shows how Swedish suspicion production is linked to international knowledge milieus where Muslim organising has long been understood through security, hidden networks, ideological infiltration, and geopolitical loyalty.
A review of Ranstorp’s Twitter feed, nearly 31,000 posts between 2011 and 2024, shows that his sources are often, on the surface, established. About half of all outgoing links go to Swedish and international mainstream press. What is interesting is which sources and authorities carry the most specific claims about political Islam, hidden networks, and Muslim organisations.
There a narrower pattern emerges. Among opinion-driven Swedish sources, the material leans heavily toward right-wing and anti-Islamist opinion milieus. In the international material, counter-jihad milieus, security-policy think tanks, pro-Israeli lobby organisations, and state-aligned Gulf media recur (see figure for examples). These milieus are closely tied to a larger geopolitical order: the United Arab Emirates’ and other Gulf states’ struggle against democratic opposition after the Arab Spring, Israel’s security- and settlement-political dominance over the Palestinians, and the West’s war on terror, which has legitimised military control, repression, and dominance over strategic areas and natural resources.
The “Muslim Brotherhood” (MB) often functions in this knowledge production as a unifying enemy image, in parallel with notions of Salafism, jihadism, and other Muslim-coded political contexts. This occurs even though the MB, after the 2013 military coup in Egypt, was subjected to harsh repression, even though the movement’s Egyptian organisation was largely smashed, and even though the MB has historically had clear ideological and political dividing lines from several Salafist movements. The political function is broader: Muslim civic organising is cast under suspicion, oppositional movements are stifled, and regional dominance is secured. When this grid of suspicion is brought into Sweden, even Swedish Muslim organisations begin to be read through conflicts and power projects shaped far outside their own activities.
The asymmetry in the source pattern is also evident in what Ranstorp chooses to leave unexamined. He comments widely, on states, actors, extremist movements the world over, but during 2024, the deadliest year of the most recent Gaza war, when Israel was accused of a very large number of violations of international law and the question of genocide was tried internationally, substantial criticism of Israel is absent from his 636 posts. One who on very vague indications identifies extremism, repression, and hidden networks seems at times selectively not to see them.
This makes the source pattern relevant to ranstorpism as a mechanism. When these sources and interpretive frames are imported into the Swedish agency environment, opinion-making, state influence, and lobbying begin to appear as expert knowledge. Ranstorp’s Twitter pattern thus becomes an example of the information laundering this text describes: ideologically inflected interpretations are imported, recoded, and can later return in Swedish reports, media, agencies, and political decisions as objective security analysis.
This is where the creation phase passes into the next link. The suspicion has been produced domestically or imported. It has acquired a raw material, a label, a seemingly empirical basis, and an institutional form, and is ready to be spread.
The normalisation
A claim, a label, or a suspicion that has been created rarely gains political significance on its own. First it must circulate, be reinforced, and be protected against objections. It is this second phase that can be called normalisation.
Normalisation occurs in several steps. First the claim begins to travel between reports, media, agencies, political actors, and courts. Each new reference is perceived as a confirmation, even though the state of the evidence stands still. What looks like several independent sources may in practice be the same claim in different institutional forms. That the origin drops out of view becomes an important precondition for the change in the claim’s status. It appears less and less as one accusation among others and begins to function as background knowledge.
This is where the chain I mentioned at the outset can be followed in detail. Three similar reports build on one another in a traceable loop. In Salafism 2.0 (Ranstorp & Ahlerup, 2022), the Norrby report is used as empirical basis for the situation in Borås. But the Norrby report in turn rests largely on the same kind of anonymous agency interviews that Salafism 2.0 itself is built on. When Salafism 2.0 has its respondents confirm the Norrby report with the formulation that “most agencies share this view” (p. 61), the circle is therefore closed. The source and the confirmation come from the same kind of actors, with the same functions, in the same city. That it might even be the same people is hard to dismiss.
Following the Norrby report’s own source references, the chain becomes thinner still. The report rests in central parts on Salafism 1.0 (Ranstorp et al., 2018), which in turn lacks original sources on Norrby. There one finds instead an academic study from 2017 by Uriya Shavit, on how Salafist scholars generally advocate child-rearing, entirely without empirical material from Borås or Sweden, plus a single anonymous interview with a police officer in the city. These two sources are then recycled again and again and made the basis for claims in Salafism 2.0 about the actual situation in Borås. Ranstorp, in practice, cites Ranstorp, without any empirical basis at the bottom.
To this is added that the Norrby report has been the object of qualified and documented criticism from several quarters, not least from the residents of Norrby themselves. Borås Tidning (3 February 2020; 18 February 2020) and Hassan et al. (2020) have pointed to faulty translations, deficient source references, and generalising portrayals of the Somali population. The authors of Salafism 2.0 do report this criticism in a footnote (pp. 47-48), but draw no methodological consequences from it. The report is in practice still treated as unproblematic factual basis. There the third step of normalisation is visible: objections are registered, but not allowed to break the chain.
The same mechanism can be illustrated by the Christian Democrats’ influence work around IRS. When the Christian Democrats (KD), in an op-ed in Dagens Nyheter on 19 February 2026, claimed that IRS had links to the Muslim Brotherhood and to violence-endorsing extremism, Global Bar Magazine asked how the party could know something that CVE did not. KD then referred to Sida, Säpo (Sweden’s Security Service), and the research of their own parliamentary candidate Sameh Egyptson. The claim thereby appeared anchored in several authoritative sources.
That Sida’s own head of department had previously described IRS as an actor with “unique added value in the humanitarian system,” or that the supporting documentation contained no evidence of anti-democratic activity, did not change this.
And following the chain backward, here too the same circular structure appears. The risk assessment in the opinion on which Sida’s decision rested was based, as noted, on “a degree of probability of ideologically coloured influence,” derived in part from the fact that someone within IRS had a connection to an allegedly “anti-democratic” milieu, reportedly the Muslim independent school Framstegsskolan, one of 22 Muslim independent schools (Sweden’s voucher system permits privately run, publicly funded schools, including faith schools) closed during this period, a school foundation that had been subjected to repeated inspections and had shown very good results.
The school’s closure rested on the Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s decision, which leaned on a Säpo opinion about “risk of radicalisation” (Säpo ref. no. 2019-10815-89.2). In that opinion, statements were attributed to an alleged “hidden leader,” without source reference, and in the appeal process the school’s lawyer showed that the same quotations, with identical mistranslations from the Arabic, appeared verbatim in Sameh Egyptson’s polemical book Erövringen (“The Conquest”), a book that, like his other polemical book and his doctoral dissertation, rests on systematic errors in translation and interpretation. The information was laundered first by Egyptson himself, from debate to dissertation, and then onward by other actors.
A political claim thus refers to agencies, the agencies refer to one another, and at the very back of the chain sits anti-Muslim knowledge production.
KD’s three seemingly independent authorities turn out to be a single source: Sameh Egyptson, the party’s own parliamentary candidate.
When such material is brought into agency decisions and courts, the genre shift is completed institutionally. Politically coloured statements, controversial blogs, and polemical books then appear as intelligence information, legal facts, or administratively relevant risk assessment, and can legitimise very drastic measures, such as the immediate closure of a school (see e.g. Swedish Schools Inspectorate ref. nos. 2021:6974 and 2021:6975, and Säpo ref. no. 2019-10815-89.2).
ProPublica documented the same mechanism when Magnus Ranstorp stated that Iran had 30,000 intelligence officers. The figure passed without source-checking through several institutional steps and was finally presented by CNN as established fact, despite the absence of evidence. When this was questioned, Ranstorp remembered nothing, and conceded that the figure was evidently inflated.
The pattern is thus not unique to Sweden, nor does it arise in a vacuum. Swedish ranstorpism actively draws nourishment from international grids of suspicion.
The import is normalised in Swedish institutions
Lorenzo Vidino, described above, has personally, including on SVT (Swedish public television), taken part in normalising the claims described above that Muslim organisations participate in dangerous hidden networks, have dual loyalties and secret agendas, and should be judged on this basis rather than on their actual activities.
The same mechanism is found in the authority argument that the Muslim Brotherhood is designated a terrorist organisation in “many countries.” What often does not emerge is that these classifications come from authoritarian states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, which designated the Brotherhood as terrorist in coordination after the Arab Spring, and from Russia, where anti-terror laws have long been used against political opponents (here in Chechnya). Human Rights Watch has warned that such laws can be used to condemn peaceful regime critics, even to death.
The United Arab Emirates has, in addition, devoted substantial resources to getting more countries to designate the Brotherhood as terrorist, an effort that has been stopped in both the American and the British parliaments. When these repressively motivated terrorist classifications are cited in European policy processes, they nonetheless often appear as neutral security assessments.
The immunisation
Once the claims have been established, they are protected against criticism, not by being tested or answered on the merits, but by redefining the criticism and silencing critics. When criticism does not lead to reconsideration but instead makes the critic suspect, normalisation has become immunised.
One example is when Andreas Krieg at King’s College London (KCL) published an analysis arguing that Magnus Ranstorp constitutes a node in the United Arab Emirates’ influence network in Sweden. Ranstorp filed a formal complaint with KCL, which resulted in Krieg publishing a sharply limited apology addressing a slippage of reference regarding Ranstorp’s role. This was used by Ranstorp and his supporters, together with emphasis on the publishing site’s connection to Turkey, to dismiss all the claims in the text. But the article’s central thesis about the connections to the United Arab Emirates remained and was never answered on the merits. The article was taken down from English-language platforms, but the Arabic version on Al Jazeera and the abstract on Krieg’s university page are still available.
An even clearer example is the case of Farid Hafez. After criticising the network, he was subjected to an extensive police investigation in Austria, with a raid, seizures, and frozen accounts, based on claims from the same knowledge production he had criticised. The accusations were dropped, but the consequences remained. When he was later connected to a newly published fact sheet at Georgetown University about Magnus Ranstorp and his role in the production of Islamophobia, Ranstorp directed an outright threat at Hafez. Later, all the fact sheets at Georgetown were unpublished, without explanation.
The mechanism is not abstract to me. When I shared an analysis of Ranstorp’s connections to the United Arab Emirates’ influence network, I was threatened by a senior manager at the Swedish Defence University at half past ten at night, who said I ought to “come and recant” if I wanted to “save myself,” that unnamed security services were keeping track of me, and that I would be handed over to law-enforcement bodies. The manager was found to have acted improperly. What I was to be saved from was never answered. And this text will likely be met by the same movement: scattered accusations, attempts to claim without any evidence that the critique of ranstorpism is itself proof of “ardinism” – that is, that it is the reviewer, not the mechanism, that is the problem.
The pattern is consistent: instead of substantive rebuttals, pressure, claims of connections, and suspicions are directed at the critics themselves. Reviewers are redefined from experts into suspects, and criticism is incorporated as further evidence. When no one can any longer both examine Islamophobia and retain their credibility, the laundered information begins to reproduce itself, in ever more institutions perceived as governed by the rule of law, without the knowledge basis ever having been tested in a single link.
The materialisation
When the claims have been normalised into institutional truth, they are translated into decisions with real consequences, in courts and agencies but also in political statements, corporate decisions, grant rules, and organisations’ own choices. This is materialisation.
Having passed one review offers no protection against the next. Having answered a claim proves nothing. It is a matter of an eternal suspension in which the logically impossible position is built into the construction: how does one deny something one has not done, when both impeccable democratic work and the very act of denial are interpreted as further evidence of a cover and a strategic double game?
The impossible position rests on the accusation of so-called “double speak,” what Sameh Egyptson in his dissertation calls “organised hypocrisy”: the idea that a Muslim organisation’s democratic message outward is merely a façade, while a wholly different, radical message is used inward. In debate, the reasoning is often linked to the notion of taqiyya, an alleged religious right for Muslims to lie in order to conceal their true aims. Aje Carlbom (a researcher who has produced reports for MSB) gives the same logic agency form in his reports to MSB, where Muslim organisations are described as “systematically unclear” and the very absence of evidence of anti-democratic intentions is taken as proof that the intentions are concealed. When the subject has been defined in advance as deceptive, every democratic stance becomes a strategic lie.
The logic is not merely theoretical but has decided concrete court cases. When MUCF (the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society) withdrew the grants to Sweden’s Young Muslims, the Administrative Court of Appeal held the organisation responsible for the statements of invited speakers in other contexts, and when SUM themselves had cancelled several speakers, precisely the repetition of cancellations was interpreted as “systematic conduct” rather than as genuine democratic will. The accused can thus refer neither to their activities nor to their words: in this logic of suspicion, both have already been defined as parts of the double game.
The spiral in practice
What makes materialisation especially effective is that each decision creates the basis for the next. The spiral moves not only upward through the legal system, but also outward into public administration, security policy, and debate. The IRS case, introduced at the outset, shows how it works in practice.
In the IRS case, the earlier school closure acquired a new function. Framstegsskolan, whose closure, as shown above, rested on a source chain without empirical bottom, was no longer merely a concluded school matter. Through an indirect personal connection, an employee with family ties to a person who had worked with the school, the suspicion could be moved onward and used as risk-assessment material in an entirely different matter. There the logic of materialisation is visible: each decision becomes the basis for the next.
CVE thus established that no evidence of anti-democratic or violence-endorsing activity existed, but nonetheless formulated, as noted at the outset, that the review could “indicate a degree of probability of ideologically coloured influence.” That became the basis for Sida’s decision (case no. 25/001060). Västtrafik, the regional public-transport authority, then referred to Sida’s decision when it refused IRS advertising space. Commentators immediately demanded that SL, Stockholm’s public-transport authority, do the same, citing Västtrafik’s decision. And so the spiral continues.
That Ranstorp appears in different roles in this process clearly shows how the circular reasoning of information laundering works. DN revealed in May 2026 how the controversial decision about IRS came about: in 2024 Ranstorp gave a presentation to Sida’s management group in which IRS’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood were described as “clear,” with reference among other things to Sameh Egyptson’s doctoral dissertation, whose extensive flaws in ethics and method had by then been thoroughly documented by two separate government bodies, the Board of Appeal for Ethical Review and the Board for Examination of Research Misconduct.
The presentation triggered yet another internal investigation, which in spring 2025 again established that there were no grounds for measures. Sida’s board, where Ranstorp had now been placed by the government and the Sweden Democrats (a far-right party with roots in the white-nationalist movement, on whose parliamentary support the current government depends), nonetheless searched further for personal connections going all the way back to the 1990s, and at the same time changed the interpretive frame. It chose to apply the government’s new precautionary principle so that uncertainty sufficed as grounds. Proven connection was no longer required, even though absolute certainty can of course never be reached, particularly not for actors working in war, crisis, and disaster areas. The support was halted in January 2026.
The Minister for International Development Cooperation, Benjamin Dousa (of the Moderate Party), celebrated the news together with Ranstorp, according to DN and leaked private messages. When confronted with this, Dousa replied that he is in ongoing contact with individual board members to “ensure that the agencies deliver on the government’s policy.” This raises the question of how the line between political steering, agency authority, and individual board members’ expert role was actually drawn in this case.
Here the logic of “interesting rumours” acquires Swedish administrative form. The question is no longer whether there is evidence that the organisation has conducted anti-democratic or violence-endorsing activity, but whether one can find fragments, personal connections, historical associations, or indirect milieu affiliations that can serve as an embodiment of the suspicion. Unlike rule-of-law crime prevention, the suspicion here can never be dismissed; it can only be confirmed. The absence of evidence is taken as evidence that one has not searched hard enough, or that the actor is sufficiently sophisticated to conceal their tracks.
The legal system offers no corrective either; on the contrary, it can become a further link in the spiral. Poljarevic and Hassan describe how Swedish courts reduce complex social contexts, a single invitation, a statement taken out of context, a family member’s alleged connection, into isolated legal evidence. They call this mechanism context erasure, where the social and political meaning behind an act is erased, and ambivalent suspicions are turned into objective legal facts. When courts moreover apply what they call security elasticity, that is, for example, allowing secret intelligence assessments from Säpo to replace the requirement of concrete evidence, the suspension is normalised as a lawful administrative measure. The rule of law fails not despite the formal processes being followed. It fails through them.
Self-disciplining
The consequences are concrete and do not stop at the closure of the organisations that have been condemned. Individuals who have run the organisations are hit hard, on flimsy grounds, which a Muslim informant in my study of labelling (2025) described as able to lead to “devastating consequences (…) You can’t do anything. You can’t work, can’t get a bank card.”
Hardest to document, but perhaps most effective, is self-disciplining. It occurs in an interplay between external repression, administrative decisions, blocked financing, exclusion from services, and internal repression, where the pressure moves into the organisation itself. Organisations reshape their activities. Critical perspectives are purged from within and pluralism is eroded. Individuals fall silent. Allies withdraw.
The silence then spreads outward. Ahmad El Far shows how this often happens through associative stigma: the stigma around an organisation also strikes those associated with it, via a narrative of guilt in which non-Muslim allies fear being accused of facilitating extremism, and a narrative of contagion in which Muslim individuals withdraw out of fear of themselves being labelled security threats. Actors within civil society begin to silence one another, and the compliant can be rewarded from above, at least as long as they are useful.
The stigma shuts out, but suspension also operates through its opposite. What Markus Holdo calls exclusionary inclusion means that Muslim organisations are invited to consultations and collaborations, but tolerated only as long as they neutralise their identity and refrain from criticism. They find themselves in permanent probation and are forced into the same impossible burden of proof. It is not real inclusion but controlled presence on conditions. Suspension is completed not with a ban; it is completed when the organisations themselves begin to guard their own boundaries.
Why “ranstorpism”?
Magnus Ranstorp recurs in many roles in central processes where the information laundering I describe becomes clear: as report author, expert, investigator, political adviser, opinion-maker, and decision-maker in his board position at Sida (the latter reportedly as a representative of the Sweden Democrats).
The process could, however, be described without personal names. It is driven not by a single researcher’s convictions, but by institutions that repeatedly choose to charge certain people with authority. Ranstorpism therefore denotes not a man, but a mechanism: how uncertain claims are moved between institutions until they take on the form of established knowledge, without any single actor needing to steer the process or even be aware of it.
What is decisive is whom power appoints as its interpreters. People such as Ranstorp, Vidino, and Egyptson, all mentioned in this text, have not reached their expert positions because their analyses have been particularly sharp, but because their conclusions confirm what power wants to be able to assert. States grant them titles, expert assignments, board seats, and inquiries, and then invoke those same titles as proof that the decisions rest on neutral expertise. The authority is thus produced by the institutions themselves and then fed back as though it were external.
Ranstorp thus becomes not the mechanism’s origin but its face: the individual figure that a structural process needs in order to be able to appear objective. He appears simultaneously in roles that, for rule-of-law processes, ought to be kept apart, where knowledge production, dissemination, and decision-making are separate links with separate actors, so that each link can test the preceding one. Information laundering lives precisely on the appearance of this independence, that several sources seem to confirm one another. When the same person occupies all the links, the appearance collapses: what is presented as independent confirmation has not only stayed in the milieu where it was first produced but, in the Swedish case, even often stays with one and the same person. The mechanism can hardly be illustrated more clearly than that.
In June 2026, as this text is being written, the Minister for Education and Integration, Simona Mohamsson (leader of the Liberal Party), appointed Magnus Ranstorp as special investigator for a government inquiry into “religious radicalisation with a focus on political Islam.” This is the same person who was recently central to the Islamophobic scandal on Sida’s board, and whose knowledge production lies behind many of the cases described here. That an actor who was already present in so many links of the chain now gains still more formal power over the state’s knowledge production on the question shows that the spiral keeps spinning.
Ranstorpism is not the state examining potentially dangerous networks, ideologies, or milieus. Such examination can be necessary, but it must rest on concrete evidence of concrete acts and be testable on the merits. Ranstorpism is what arises when suspicion replaces evidence and association replaces action, when a closed knowledge production is allowed to circulate between reports, media, agencies, and decisions without ever being tested. And the stakes are high: an entire minority’s ability to organise is extinguished, not for what people have done, but for who they are.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes
To understand how this structure works, there is much to learn from history. Common to the historical examples that follow is that the threat is said to be hidden. Therefore ordinary evidentiary requirements can be replaced by witnesses, indications, and expert interpreters.
During the Inquisition in the 15th and 16th centuries, processes were built in which one could be condemned on the suspicion of heresy, based on denunciations and indications, always something that could not be seen or verified directly, but had to be testified to. During the European witch trials, testimony from neighbours and religious authorities was used to prove something even more invisible: sorcery.
This does not mean that real threats never exist. There are violent actors and oppressive supremacists, and states have the right and the duty to protect people. The point is a different one: that the rhetoric of panic conceals the real threats as much as it invents false ones, because it targets what people are assumed to be rather than what they do. The wrong people are singled out, and the actual dangers are hidden in the noise. And what one claims to protect, purity, faith, freedom, democracy, is seldom what is actually defended. The emblem is hijacked. Christianity can be described as basic, fundamental values, such as loving one’s neighbour, seeing every human being as of equal worth, and creating an egalitarian kingdom, just as democracy is often understood to aim at creating a good society for all. Precisely for that reason it is such an effective cover for its opposite: repression is easiest to carry out in the name of what we hold sacred.
In the United States in the 19th century, testimony from “escaped nuns” was used to prove that Catholics, “papists,” were secretly governed by the Pope and harboured loyalties incompatible with the American state. During the McCarthy period, insider witnesses with alleged knowledge of communist networks were used to prove hidden disloyal organising. In Sweden, IB (the Information Bureau, a secret military-intelligence operation that surveilled left-wing activists and trade unionists during the Cold War, exposed in 1973 as a major democratic scandal) mapped political engagement and reclassified oppositional work for peace and workers’ rights as loyalty to enemies, where the classification itself carried consequences, without the underlying suspicion needing to be proven.
In Sweden today, so-called ex-Muslims, defectors, political opponents of oppressive Islamist regimes, and anonymous officials fill a similar function: they are used to prove hidden Islamist structures that are not visible in the activities but are assumed to exist behind them.
The pattern is recognisable: the label both precedes the evidence and produces it. In Sweden such labels circulate openly through state-financed reports, parliamentary motions, academic works with documented flaws, and an avalanche of liberal editorials that reinforce one another through repetition. The label need not be substantiated; it is enough that it recurs in sufficiently many authoritative contexts. Whoever objects risks being accused of being dangerous to democracy themselves.
De-democratisation in the name of democracy
As Arundhati Roy has shown, a new McCarthyism is under way, in which dissidents are silenced without power even needing to invoke violence, and under whose umbrella “monstrous things will grow and flourish in countries all over the world.” Sweden is one of those countries. We need a name for this mechanism, and I call it ranstorpism.
History has shown similar processes many times before. And in every epoch they have been driven in the name of the epoch’s own emblem. During the Inquisition the emblem was called purity, during the witch trials faith, during McCarthyism freedom. In our time the emblem is called democracy. That those who drive the mechanism use the same words as the thing they are dismantling makes it hard to talk about, or even to see. Krzyżanowski and Krzyżanowska call it conceptual flipsiding, that liberal-democratic concepts retain their form but acquire the opposite function, what Orwell in 1984 called newspeak. The democracy invoked against Muslim organisations is a democracy used to restrict participation and to turn some of the most vulnerable citizens into society’s worst threat.
And in the moment the label ceases to be an accusation and begins to function as a fact, the trap shuts: the witch cannot prove that she does not obey the devil, the papist that he does not obey the Pope, the Islamist that their democratic work does not conceal its opposite. The category is defined as the very most dangerous threat of the moment, and the actors are then placed in that category.
What begins as suspicion and is normalised as knowledge ends here: in a societal sphere where rights formally remain, but where the possibility of using them gradually disappears. Muslim organisations and Muslim residents are shut out from resources, collaborations, and public presence. Representatives have described it as an “ongoing erasure of Muslim civic life.”
This is happening right now, and in the name of democracy.
The rights, however, still remain, at least on paper. And as long as they do, the possibility of reversing the development also remains. Processes of this kind can be stopped, but only if they are named for what they are, before they are completed. That is why this text is written.
Anna Ardin is a political scientist who researches civil society, democracy, and the treatment of Muslim organisations at the Institute for Civil Society and Religion at Marie Cederschiöld University.
She has recently published “The Islamist Labeling of Muslim CSOs” in the Islamophobia Studies Journal, together with Mattias Irving, and “Stämplad som extremist” (“Labelled as an Extremist”) in Socialmedicinsk tidskrift.
Artikel publicerad 07 augusti, 2026.